Business-to-business electronic commerce has long promised significant improvements in the speed, accuracy, and efficiency with which transactions between businesses can be conducted. In industries such as construction, for example, a project may entail tens of thousands transactions relating to acquisition of building materials, sub-contractor services, cost allocations, etc. In the conventional manual manner of conducting such transactions, suppliers and contractors each require staff who interpret and manually enter transaction information that is received as a printed transaction documents via mail or telephonic facsimile. Business-to-business electronic commerce has offered the promise of transmitting such transaction information electronically, thereby decreasing the cost and errors that can arise in conventional manual processing of transaction documents.
One type of business-to-business electronic commerce is called electronic data interchange (EDI). Two well-known standards for EDI are the ANSI X12 standard, promulgated by the American National Standards Institute, and UN/EDIFACT, an international standard used especially widely in Western Europe. A limitation on the implementation of business-to-business electronic commerce has been the requirement that both parties to a transaction adopt a common business-to-business electronic commerce system or protocol. In practice, that means that every supplier, contractor, vendor, etc. in the industry must adopt the same standard. The expense, time, and cooperation required to implement for such an industry-wide standard can be significant.
The present invention includes an electronic business transaction method for conducting a business transaction over a computer network. The method includes creating on an originating computer an electronic business transaction document that is compatible with a business management software program capable of automatically populating and extracting information from electronic business transaction document. The electronic business transaction document is transmitted over the computer network to an intended recipient computer.
Also, a determination is made as to whether the intended recipient computer is capable of viewing the electronic business transaction document. If it is determined that the intended recipient computer is not capable of viewing the electronic business transaction document, a viewer application or access to it is transmitted to the recipient computer with the electronic business transaction document. The viewer application allows the user to interact with documents (i.e., manually create, modify and view them), but does not otherwise perform business management processes. In one implementation, the viewer allows users to select data from lists (e.g., contacts and job numbers) as well as track sent and received documents.
In one implementation, the method includes transmitting the electronic business transaction document directly to the intended recipient computer, for example as an e-mail attachment. In another implementation, the method includes transmitting the electronic business transaction document to an intermediary server computer that forwards the electronic business transaction document to the intended recipient computer.
The electronic business transaction method of the present invention allows the operator of a computer with business management software to transmit electronic business transaction documents to effect business-to-business electronic commerce transactions regardless of whether the receiving computer includes the business management software, or even a viewer to open electronic business transaction document. As a result, electronic business transaction method of the present invention allows business-to-business electronic commerce to be initiated if only one party has the business management software. This overcomes the typical limitation in business-to-business electronic commerce, which requires that virtually all parties to a project adopt and implement a common electronic commerce software standard.
Additional objects and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the detailed description of the preferred embodiment thereof, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.